Recent lackluster health scenario in India has called for actions. Doctors have faced wrath from patients and family members. But there is a basic misconception. Just like the aphorism: a captain is only as good as his crew, so too doctors have been handicapped by inaccurate diagnostic results. There is a glimmer of hope though, in the form of personalized medicine.
What is personalized medicine?
We know that just like the thumb prints, genetic characteristics of the human beings are different from each other. Every human body responds differently to the same drug. In health care "one size fits all" is an old school thinking now. Customization of healthcare is needed to get the maximum results. And to achieve this aim, the concept of personalized medicine was invented. The ultimate target of personalized medicine is to treat each and every patient as individual and to provide the tailor made medicine to get effective results quickly.
How it works?
In traditional health care scenario, the doctor treats the ailments on the basis of symptoms, clinical analysis, pathological diagnosis and family as well as medical history. Usually, the treatment starts only after appearance of the symptom in the human body. Usually there are set protocols for treating ailments, including surgical, medical, radiological intervention strategies.
Medicines are given in defined dosage, sometimes calculating the body mass, weight parameters etc. However, even though medicines come out in the market after rigorous statistical analysis on cohorts of patients, clinicians are helpless in cases the medicine does not work. Personalized medicine helps the doctors in pre-determining if a certain medicine is going to work or not; in other words define the efficacy of treatment and define endpoint of the disease.
The analysis of environment, regular diet, lifestyle, stress level, inherited genetic makeup, cellular behavior of a damaged cell from its intracellular signaling to cellular cross talk triggered by the gene activation help to identify the performance potential of a therapy regime. A gene mutation can lead to higher unnecessary activation levels or inhibition of a normal signaling in a cell and this can lead to impaired drug function.
Therefore personalized medicine is looked at from two levels (i) genotypic level where the gene induced changes are accounted for and (ii) phenotypic level where the cellular behavior of a cell is looked at before deciding on a therapy regime. Personalized medicine therefore helps one to have a better treatment leading to reduction of overuse of drugs or preventing underuse of therapy. At an inheritance level, It also helps to determine if anyone is prone or susceptible to a disease.
Personalized medicine and Oncology:
Even though personalized medicine can be utilized in various infectious or systemic diseases; but oncology is the zone where it can transform the lives of the patients. The genetic makeup and phenotypic characteristic of cancer vary from person to person. That's why every cancer patient responds to treatments differently. With the help of molecular analysis, the patients can be stratified and treated accordingly. In today's scenario clinicians routinely use molecular tools to thermostatically identify drug performances in breast, ovarian, colon, lung, head and neck and hematological oncology.
Present Scenario
Every year pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars in clinical trials before launching drugs. Molecular analysis and diagnosis not only saves the money but also helps them to focus on the research for betterment in healthcare.
Debarati Chakraboty Nath is the content developer for Suraksha Diagnostic Pvt Ltd. She is responsible for the content, online promotion of the website: http://surakshanet.com/
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